The HPR Audiobook Club reviews City Of Masks with author Mike Reeves-McMillan

Hosted by HPR_AudioBookClub on 2018-01-31 is flagged as Explicit and is released under a CC-BY-SA license. Tags:Audiobooks, City of Masks, Mike Reeves-McMillan.Listen in ogg,
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Things We Talked About

http://gplus.to/mikerm will link to everything else. It's also where I hang out the most. I post samples of whatever I'm working on at the moment on G+ most Saturdays, as part of the #saturdayscenes group.
http://csidemedia.com/gryphonclerks is my blog. There's a signup link for the mailing list in the sidebar, or the direct link is:
http://eepurl.com/vB-t5
There's some member-only content for mailing list members, and I'm planning to release another piece of content for them soon (a 12,000-word novelette in my Gryphon Clerks setting).

Mike's G+ Page: http://gplus.to/mikerm

OUR NEXT AUDIOBOOK

NEXT RECORDING

Our next book club recording will be 2015/02/10T23:00:00+00:00. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Times. If you'd like a Google calendar invite, or if you'd like to be on the HPR_AudioBookClub mailing list, please get in contact with us on the HPR mailing list 'hpr at hackerpublicradio dot org'

FEEDBACK

Thank you very much for listening to this episode of the HPR_AudioBookClub. We had a great time recording this show, and we hope you enjoyed it as well. We also hope you'll consider joining us next time. Please leave a few words in the episode's comment section.
As always; remember to visit the HPR contribution page HPR could really use your help right now.

P.S. Some people really like finding mistakes. For their enjoyment, we always include a few.

OUR AUDIO

This episode was processed using Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. We've been making small adjustments to our audio mix each month in order to get the best possible sound. It's been especially challenging getting all of our voices relatively level, because everyone has their own unique setup. Mumble is great for bringing us all together, and for recording, but it's not good at making everyone's voice the same volume. We're pretty happy with the way this month's show turned out, so we'd like to share our editing process and settings with you and our future selves (who, of course, will have forgotten all this by then).

Mumble uses a sample rate of 48kHz, but HPR requires a sample rate of 44.1kHz so the first step in our audio process is to resample the file at 44.1kHz. Resampling can take a long time if you don't have a powerful computer, and sometimes even if you do. If you record late at night, like we do, you may want to start the task before you go to bed, and save it first thing in the morning, so that the file is ready to go the next time you are.

Next we use the "Compressor" effect with the following settings:

Threshold: -30db

Noise Floor: -50db

Ratio: 3:1

Attack Time: 0.2sec

Decay Time: 1.0 sec

"Make-up Gain for 0db after compressing" and "compress based on peaks" were both left un-checked.

After compressing the audio we cut any pre-show and post-show chatter from the file and save them in a separate file for possible use as outtakes after the closing music.

At this point we listen back to the whole file and we work on the shownotes. This is when we can cut out anything that needs to be cut, and we can also make sure that we put any links in the shownotes that were talked about during the recording of the show. We finish the shownotes before exporting the .aup file to .FLAC so that we can paste a copy of the shownotes into the audio file's metadata. We use the "Truncate Silence" effect with its default settings to minimize the silence between people speaking. When used with its default (or at least reasonable) settings, Truncate Silence is extremely effective and satisfying. It makes everyone sound smarter, it makes the file shorter without destroying actual content, and it makes a conversations sound as easy and fluid during playback as it was while it was recorded. It can be even more effective if you can train yourself to remain silent instead of saying "uuuuummmm." Just remember to ONLY pass the file through Truncate Silence ONCE. If you pass it through a second time, or if you set it too aggressively your audio may sound sped up and choppy.

At this point we add new, empty audio tracks into which we paste the intro, outro and possibly outtakes, and we rename each track accordingly.

We adjust the Gain so that the VU meter in Audacity hovers around -12db while people are speaking, and we try to keep the peaks under -6db, and we adjust the Gain on each of the new tracks so that all volumes are similar, and more importantly comfortable. Once this is done we can "Mix and Render" all of our tracks into a single track for export to the .FLAC file which is uploaded to the HPR FTP server.

Remember to save often when using Audacity. We like to save after each of these steps. Audacity has a reputation for being "crashy" but if you remember save after every major transform, you will wonder how it ever got that reputation.

Comments

Comment #1 posted on 2018-02-05T00:22:05Z by hammerron

a second Star Trek reference

As soon as you said Star Trek, it made me think of TNG season 7, an episode called Masks . In that episode both Data and Picard wore masks and had altered roles.

Comment #2 posted on 2018-02-05T22:28:53Z by lostnbronx

Excellent Episode

I really enjoyed this installment of the Audiobook Club. It was great hearing from the author, who was thoughtful and articulate, explaining what sounded like complex concepts and making them clear. I'm really excited to listen to this book, spoilers notwithstanding.

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